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Friday, August 12, 2016

Spontaneous Order

We can't avoid politics - 'All politics is identity politics'. Family politics. Bedroom politics. Staffroom politics. Wherever there are people, we will be negotiating our place in the world. The job of Big Government should be pretty boring. In my Utopia, the real juicy politics would be very local. Big Government would be about the basic Human Rights. The lowest common denominator. The stuff almost everyone agrees on. Then people would be able to move around to find the kind of world they want to live in. Or stay in one place and build it together.

People are better at solving their own problems than other people are at solving those problems for them. We have a lot of Tacit Knowledge that is hard to explain, and it is very hard to understand other peoples worlds. The combination of a Universal Basic Income, and open borders with local rules allows lots of community building and allows people to think of things that are hard to monetise, i.e. A UBI, Rule of Law, and freedom of movement release humans to solve human problems. It isn't a policy pathway to a solution. It isn't politics. It isn't ideology. It is a framework for spontaneous order. It is the oxygen, water and soil that allows evolution to start and do its own thing.

The majestic beauty of spontaneous order

The unavoidable politics then stops being about campaigning for power, and becomes about the individual relationships. The complex, ambiguous, uncertainty that exists in all the relationships that matter to us. How much to open up? How much to trust? How much to invest? How much to risk?

If we live in a world where everyone can be assured of their human rights, then we don't need to panic as much about plotting each step on the path to where we want to be. Where we want to be is very detached from where we are. We have no idea what the world is going to throw at us. What we know a lot about is right now. We know a lot about how we engage with others. We know a lot about the next step we take.

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Swart Donkey

Swart means Black (my surname) in Afrikaans. I am proud of my African roots but am a global citizen who believes that we should look to define ourselves collectively by the great things we can achieve. I believe in freedom of people and ideas and that we are moving towards a more friendly, happy world. Like a Donkey, I can be noisy, stubborn and ignorant - but like a Donkey I am willing to put effort in to change. The focus of this blog is happiness and learning - so basically, it is a blog on everything.